The Red Peril: The Russian Revolution and American Anti-Bolshevism
Some may think it counterintuitive to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution with two American anti-Bolshevik films, yet the United States reaction to the “ten days that shook the world” determined the course of the 20th century (and beyond) as much as the Revolution itself. Before Russia withdrew from World War I, on-screen portrayals of the Revolution were mixed – for example, The Rose of Blood, released in November 1917, starred Theda Bara as a sympathetic revolutionary who blows herself up in order to kill her aristocrat husband. The film was banned in Chicago, leading George Creel, chairman of the Committee on Public Information (surely the most French Revolution-sounding official body in American history) to repudiate the Chicago censor, stating, “The President of the United States himself has declared his full sympathy with that revolution.”
Woodrow Wilson’s views evolved to a degree, yet he continued to maintain that Tsarist autocracy made revolution inevitable, and the flaws of capitalism led to understandable unrest. Others in his government were far more pro-capitalist and anti-Bolshevik, arguing that Germany was funding Lenin and Trotsky to get Russia out of the War; a New York Times headline in September 1918 trumpeted, “Bolshevik Chiefs Paid by Germany for Russia’s Ruin.” The propaganda machine continued to whip up such notions after the guns fell silent, playing on nativist tendencies which, combined with labor unrest and the skyrocketing cost of living, ushered in the Red Scare of 1919-20.
At first, as with Elmer Clifton’s Boots (February 1919), the perceived threat could be taken humorously, but a few months later, a slew of films such as Bolshevism on Trial (April) and The World Aflame (July) helped stoke the hysteria building in the media. The two titles in our programme, The Right to Happiness and The World and Its Woman, were released in August and September that year, at the height of the Red Scare. So toxic had the atmosphere become that on the opening day of The World and Its Woman at the Strand Theatre in New York a Portuguese barber named Manuel Lopez was savagely beaten by an audience furious that he was applauding the revolutionaries on screen: “Men scrambled over the back of seats to get a whack at the noisy offender, who was speedily surrounded on all sides and was absorbing the kicks and punches of indignant men and scratches of infuriated women.” (New York Sun) After Lopez was rescued by a policeman he was taken to night court, where the magistrate fined him $10, warning “this is a bad country in which to express a liking for Bolshevism.”

Jay Weissberg